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Louis Dumont on the National Variants of the Modern Ideology: II Comparative Civilizations Review Volume 32 Number 32 Spring 1995 Article 2 4-1-1995 Louis Dumont on the National Variants of the Modern Ideology: II Leonidas Donskis Klaipeda University, Lithuania Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr Recommended Citation Donskis, Leonidas (1995) "Louis Dumont on the National Variants of the Modern Ideology: II," Comparative Civilizations Review: Vol. 32 : No. 32 , Article 2. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol32/iss32/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Comparative Civilizations Review by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Donskis: Louis Dumont on the National Variants of the Modern Ideology: II 2 COMPARATIVE CIVILIZATIONS REVIEW LOUIS DUMONT ON THE NATIONAL VARIANTS OF THE MODERN IDEOLOGY: II* Leonidas Donskis The National Variants of Modern Ideology Dumont's strategy of research is based on his deep sense of the relationship between a part and a whole in the history of ideas: "The histo- ry of ideas in the modern Occident would be considered as a whole, along its main lines of development, in the fundamental unity it could not fail to disclose when viewed against the background of a different civilization. [...] The subject may be approached along three relatively concrete lines: one historical, one that I would call configurational, and one national or 'sub- cultural.'"28 In this essay the subject will be further approached along one of these three lines - namely, along the subcultural line. Dumont, I should say, employs the sociological term "subculture" by stressing the interdependence of national cultures within the general ideological framework of modernity.29 These national variants of modern ideology, or national subcultures of the modern European culture, may well be called the national ideological discourses, or ideological languages, of modernity by stressing the excep- tional significance of national languages within the general ideological framework of modern nationalism (as shown above, the latter is perceived by Dumont as merely hypostatized individualism.30 He writes: It may be objected that such an ideology [the modern ideology] does not really exist, for what might be so called varies from one country or one major language area to another. There are, for example, English, French, German subcultures within European culture. But the fact entails simply that we ought to take those subcultures, or the corresponding ideologies, as so many variants - of equal status - of modern ideology. Ideally, a concrete knowledge of modern ideology would be attained if we could pass from one variant to another in a systematic fashion, as if by applying a set of transformations [...]." *Louis Dumont of the National Variant of the Modern Ideology: Part I appeared in Comparative Civilization Review (Fall 1994): 2-17. Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 1995 1 Comparative Civilizations Review, Vol. 32 [1995], No. 32, Art. 2 Leonidas Donskis 3 It should be noted that Dumont's introductory note about "so many variants - of equal status [sic!] - of modern ideology" is not accidental. In spite of the emphasis he has placed on the interdependence of the above subideologies, not on these subideologies themselves, Dumont has come to stress the equal status of the national subcultures of European culture. As will be shown below, such an equality of cultures, that is, the principle of equality, is considered by Dumant as but a manifestation of nominalistic thinking. Does this reflect the flexibility of Dumont's approach which allows him to employ deliberately the elements of nominalistic discourse by placing them into the framework of holistic thinking, and thus by absorbing them into a sphere of hierarchical complementarity? We should say a few words about how a Dumontian study is ana- lytically organized before following Dumontian thought approaching Herder's and Fichte's ideas. This study is directed first to the problem of German identity, as it has been exposed in Herder's idea of Volk and Fichte's of Nation. According to Dumont, [...] the basic procedure consisted in a comparison of configura- tions of ideas; the study was therefore essentially static and mor- phological, neither dynamic nor directly concerned with inter-action. As the study developed, however, it appeared with increasing force that German culture should be looked at not in isolation but as involved in a vital relationship with its environ- ment.32 The first national variant is being associated with Herder's Volk and Fichte's Nation. It is interesting to note that the former is here conceived as a major polemicist against the English and particularly the French Enlightenment and thus a pure phenomenon of the German national variant of the upcoming modernity, while the latter is seen as the philosopher of the French Revolution. Dumont is deeply concerned with the short-lived Sturm und Drang movement at the time of which Herder had published Auch eine Philosophic der Geschichte. This book (and especially its title) is something like a reply to Voltaire who had introduced the term "philosophy of histo- ry." Herder rehabilitates everything that the French and English eigh- teenth century rejected or ignored: the barbarous Middle Ages, Ancient Egypt sacrificed to the glory of Greece, and perhaps most important, religion. Instead of history consisting in the accession of reason, a reason disembodied and everywhere iden- tical to itself, Herder sees in history the contrasted interplay of https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol32/iss32/2 2 Donskis: Louis Dumont on the National Variants of the Modern Ideology: II 4 COMPARATIVE CIVILIZATIONS REVIEW individual cultures or cultural individuals, each constituting a specific human community, or Volk, in which an aspect of gen- eral humanity is embodied in a unique and irreplaceable manner. The German Volk, bearer of western Christian culture, is the modern example of the category. In the flow of history there is not only simply progress (Fortschritt) but, within each of the two civilizational complexes, the ancient and the modern, what one may call a succession of 'forward strivings' or blossomings (Fortgang, Fortstreben), all 'of equal necessity, equal originali- ty, equal merit, equal happiness' [..J.33 At first sight, Herder may be perceived not only as a critic of the modern universalist rationalism and of the one-dimensional belief in never-ending progress mainly expressed in the French Enlightenment, but also as a polemicist against the individualist French culture, as it had been shaped mainly by Voltaire and the authors of the Encyclopedie. One would think that Herder's definition of man would affirm this statement: to the con- trary of the theoreticians of the Enlightenment, Herder speaks of man belonging to a given cultural community (as Rousseau did), not of the abstract and historyless individual, a representative of the human species. It is, however, nothing but the first impression obviously lacking in attentiveness to the important details of Herder's theoretical discourse. His Auch eine Philosophic der Geschichte may be defined neither as simply a call for collective identity in the age of universalist individualism totally despising all the cultural differences and civilizational diversity of humani- ty nor as an intrusion of holism into a civilizational discourse dominated by nominalism. To state this would be to simplify the reality of ideas produced by Herder. It is small wonder, then, that Dumont points out: In traditional holism, the society is exclusive, humankind coin- cides with the society formed by us, and strangers are devalued as being, at best, imperfect men. By the way, even modern patri- otism is tinged with that feeling. With Herder, on the contrary, all cultures are recognized as equal in principle. It should be clear that such an assertion is possible only because cultures are viewed as so many individuals, equal among themselves notwithstanding their difference; cultures are individuals of a collective nature. In other words, Herder on the one hand dis- cards individualism in favor of holism on the level of the ele- ments, that is, when he considers individual human beings; but on the other hand he uses the individualist principle by transfer- ring it to the level of compounds [...] when he considers collec- tive entities that before him were unacknowledged or subordi- Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 1995 3 Comparative Civilizations Review, Vol. 32 [1995], No. 32, Art. 2 Leonidas Donskis 5 nated. It would therefore be wrong to see Herder as rejecting wholesale the individualist - mainly French - culture, for at the same time he accepts a major feature of it in order to assert against that very culture the existence and value of German cul- ture and, with it, of all others that have flourished in history. Therefore, taken globally, Herder's reaction must be located within the modern value system. His holism must be seen as contained within the individualism that he fiercely attacks - and the circumstance may well account for the style of the book, which is tense, screaming, almost panting.34 In spite of the emergence of the notion of Humanitat - which evi- dently refers to that of universality - in his Ideen, Herder is seen by Dumont as the theoretician combining the elements of both holism and individual-
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